Out of Luck in Las Vegas? Try again at the Country Store

Baker, California is a lay-by. A rest stop. A long, parched strip of gas stations, fast-food joints, and mini-marts that dance in the heat-soaked air off the highway. In the hard light of day it's no place to spend more time than you have to, and there's no other kind of light as soon as the sun comes up.

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95 miles southwest of Las Vegas and perched on the rim of Death Valley, it was a rail stop before the highway came through and cemented the value of the dry and dusty little intersection. Baker has never been anything but an outpost. A place to find a cold drink in the desert, or to check your oil, or top off your gas.

It's also an oasis of good fortune.

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Chris Cantle

The Country Store holds down the intersection of Baker Blvd and Highway 127. At the end of the Interstate off-ramp, it's the busiest corner in town, across from a scorching white Greek restaurant and next to the town's thermometer, a 134-foot monolith with glowing lights. The store itself is a short, dense building, fronted by a old-timey veneer and thrumming to the sound of AC compressors. It looks like any other hokey, themed mini-mart, and it wouldn't stand apart from a half-dozen other convenience stores but for one thing.

Eight (actually, make that nine) lottery jackpot winners have bought their tickets here. Baker is a town of less than a thousand.

I wander in to hear a fella getting paid out for a lotto ticket at the register. Surprised, I follow him out the door to ask about his winnings. "It's not much but it's something!" he says. Scott won six dollars. He tells me that he commutes between Vegas and (gesturing vaguely) "out here" and that he buys a lottery ticket at the Country Store every chance he gets.

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Chris Cantle

Back inside, I buy a bottle of water and poke around. Las Vegas novelties and Death Valley trinkets abound. There's a wall of soda bottles of every conceivable flavor—a sign outside boasts 400+ varieties. Every flavor, indeed, everything under the sun seems to be represented, from bacon to Mao Tse Tung, all in soda form. I hear that the Route 66 and Death Valley colas sell well. It pains me that I failed to inquire about the line featuring Stalin and Osama bin Laden.

Ten minutes later Dago, the morning manager, tells me that while I was contemplating colas he paid out $100 on a scratcher. He shows me the winner, then files it away in a drawer, on top of a short stack of other winners. A much deeper pile fills a trash can next to counter, but never mind that. In fifteen minutes I've already seen more lottery success than I imagined possible.

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Chris Cantle

"When people are heading to Vegas they spend money. They pay for everything with $50, $100 bills." Dago laughs. "On their way back, they pay with quarters."

Dago is a 14-year veteran of the store, and a Baker resident. I ask how he does it. Without looking up he points to every air conditioner vent in the store. It was 88 degrees when I pulled into town at 8:30 am. "Today it'll be...105?" He shrugs it off. When I duck my head outside at 9:30 the giant thermometer reads 93. Around 10:30 it breezes past 100.

Chris Cantle

I've stopped in Baker more times than I can count, and I've always admired it as reliable place to run across attractive French tourists, trying on hats or fiddling with the pumps as they make their way between LA and Las Vegas in rented Mustangs. I'd never seen the Lotto luck though. Maybe if I'd looked closer. The telltale titanium curls of scratched-away hope fleck every surface.

"In the whole history of the store, we've got a lot of winners." Dago says in a moment of calm at the counter. "Eight jackpots. Last time was $14 million. The small wins, they're all the time." He nods to the scratcher machines idling by the door. "A lady going to Vegas won $100,000, she was jumping, happy." He tells me in his drawling Central American accent. "She said she was heading straight back to Los Angeles."

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